


If Daylight Won't Receive You (it's the remix to perdition)

by maypop



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-22
Updated: 2015-06-22
Packaged: 2018-04-05 13:43:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4181997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maypop/pseuds/maypop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>old and got some addictions/lucy burnin in hell/gonna make this girl listen</p>
            </blockquote>





	If Daylight Won't Receive You (it's the remix to perdition)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [coyotesuspect](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coyotesuspect/gifts).



> AKA, Sam and Dean should have kept some people in the loop a little more. Oops. Remix of [this.](http://coyotesuspect.livejournal.com/10178.html)

“We should. We should pray,” says Amelia hesitantly, running a hand through her hair.

Claire looks down. Her legs are hanging off the edge of the motel bed. Her mother is sitting in a chair pulled up next to the bedside table, now holding out her hands over two cups of coffee and a bag of powdery donuts. Claire looks back up again, half expecting to meet black eyes, but they're pale, set in a worry-pinched face, filled with love.

Claire lets her mother take her hands, and bows her head with her. She doesn't close her eyes. Her mother's hands are still just a little bigger than hers, and she feels a fleeting worry that she'll notice Claire's calluses.

"Oh Lord," Amelia Novak begins. Claire stares down and wishes she hadn't gotten powdered donuts. They make a mess, and Claire wears a lot of dark colors these days. Claire opens her mouth to say this--her mother is looking up, sensing something is wrong, disapproving of interrupting the prayer--Claire opens her eyes.

The motel room is empty. Her mother is dead. Claire sits up straight and curls immediately forward around the stabbing, scraping pain low in her abdomen. She wraps her arms around herself, making her regularly scheduled promise to do something about this monster attracting fountain. Maybe the implant, she can't rely on something like pills without a fixed address and a clear head. There are hunter friendly doctors. She suspects, sourly, they may view getting her up into the stirrups slightly differently than jerking her arms back into socket.

Her brain is spinning out a little fantasy about a vampire who preys on gynecologists and her own timely rescue, when she notices a smell that isn't blood.

It's coffee, cooling on the bedside table, next to a vending machine bag of chocolate donuts.

Claire slips between the sheets and onto the floor with less sound than a sheet of paper falling off a desk, down into the space between beds. Her gun is in her hand a second later. She checks under the beds and rises to check the bathroom, the only hidden place in the motel room. It's empty.

The coffee's only slightly warm, which could mean a long distance between pouring and ending up on her table, or it could mean someone stood over her in her sleep.

 

*

 

She tells the boy at the counter, when she goes to pay up for a few more days, she shifts and elides and looks sad until his heart, tugged, and his brain, deathly bored in his tiny counter realm, conspires to pull her story from her. Abuse. Not safe at home, not safe in her city. He's still looking for her. Claire touches the corners of her eyes, draws away budding tears, too weary to cry. If he sees anyone come near her door--of course he's so busy, she's not asking him to watch, just if he happens to see anyone--

In the end he would probably follow her into a minor war. She steps out of the office and goes to her car. No little surprises in there. She even pops the hood, gets down on her knees in the gravel to look underneath, shines her little flashlight around the wheel wells.

As Claire drives into town she considers, again, just running, but only in the abstracted way she considers the edges of tall buildings, or which celebrities would make the best Claire Novak Eiffel Tower. Someone wants to scare her. She is, accordingly, going to beat their face in. Being a Hunter is all about making the stupid choice.

 

*

 

She's temporarily deaf in her left ear when she makes it back to her motel that night. Migraine combination platter, one banshee (pacified but still living his best life way above high C), four gunshots at much too close range. She has to keep tilting her head towards the desk clerk while he assures her he didn't see anyone near her room, or check in anyone new today. Claire wonders if it looks like flirting. He is cute, sort of. She thanks him.

There are no more presents in her room. She checks every corner, fills the window and the thresholds with things that smell and go clink and signal, metaphysically, multilingually, that here is the stake, here are spoken the ninety-nine names of god, here is one who sees your hollow back and backwards feet, here is one with a huge fuck off gun and also a sock full of cabbage seeds, if that's more your thing, so come and have a go if you think you're hot shit.

Claire unmakes the bed and replaces the bottom sheet with her own, and falls asleep on top of a devil's trap.

 

*

 

The second night in Las Cruces, there are storms in her dreams. It's not the season for it. Being who she is, Claire tries to remember who lives here and what brings their rain to them, trickster, demon, god, folk hero, is this going to be her problem too, before she thinks about climate change, before she turns her head to the other bed, where her mother sleeps.

Dream logic--she knows it's her mother before she stands and sees the hair spread on the pillow, the fast-aging face smoothed out with sleep. Amelia Novak looks peaceful.

Claire holds up her hands. One of her pinkies is halfway curled into her palm, won't straighten out, doesn't have much sensation. She's still the same age, then, this is the body of Claire the killer.

"Mom?" she whispers, and Amelia snaps awake.

"Baby?" she says, sleep foggy. She looks at Claire like she's still her little girl.

"I had a nightmare," Claire says, feeling stupid.

Amelia Novak lifts up the top sheet, and Claire slides in next to her, guilty, ashamed, a thief. She doesn't know what this moment is stolen from, but she knows she will have to pay. Her mother's arms close around her. Claire lies awake, while her mother's breath goes soft and even again, and the rain slams doors and batters the glass.

*

Claire wakes. The storm is real. The other bed is empty. The bedside table has a bottle of Aleve on it that she didn't buy. Claire checks the room, not expecting to find anything, and is furious to be proven right.

The protections in the window are untouched, unmoved. The only sign of her visitor is the painkillers, and--is the room cold? Does she just want it to be, is it the rain pulling the heat away? She can't tell. The hair taped over the crack in the door is whole. The unbroken cursive line of salt still says _fuck you_.

Claire goes into town. She spends the day reading newspapers and history in rotation. It's unhelpful. This country is half port city and half charnel house, rich with vengeful dead and awash with a thousand kinds of curse, ghost, bloodsucker, bonecracker, breathstealer, flying purple fucking people eater, and they've all got their own reasons. It's impossible to know every monster in the splintered mythos of America, and there are no easy clues here, other than _powerful_.

At lunch she takes an Aleve without thinking about it, and realizes it much too late for throwing up to be any good. "Please don't be corpse powder, at least give me that," she says to the air, though it's not really the right area for that.

"Special today is chicken piccata," the server says.

"Sure," Claire says. "And a sweet tea. Thanks."

She reads on. At the end of the day, Claire hasn't found anything that points away from the fucking angels.

By dusk she's back in her room, staring at the other bed. There's a phone in her hand. She's half-dialed the Winchesters eight times. She can't bring herself to finish the number. They might answer.

Claire tells herself, when she settles the phone gently back down, she tells herself that two points of data aren't enough to be a pattern. She needs to know more. Three times will be enough to make something of it.

She lays down on her devil's trap sheets, and dreams.

 

*

 

“Mom,” interrupts Claire. She's trying to keep the fury out of her voice. Amelia pauses and glances up at her. Glances up from the Bible, that red lettered badly translated Gideon pamphlet. “Do you really think we should still do this after what happened to--"

You.

"--Dad?”

Her mother just stares, clearly uncomprehending. It's Sunday--Claire had forgotten. Claire had forgotten the shape of her mother's chin, too, especially set like this. This Amelia Novak has never lost her faith. Her eyes still fix on Claire, without flinching or sliding. Amelia Novak had it in her to lose her husband. She hadn't had it in her to lose God.

"Claire." Her lips form a thin line. "God works--"

She wants to scream, she wants it like air and blood when a hand closes around your throat. Claire doesn't get what she wants very often. Her mother is looking up at her.

"--In mysterious ways," Claire says, because she's weak, because she's been given this thing, and she can't make her mother cry one more time.

Her mother's forehead smooths a little. Claire aches.

Her mother's lips move a bit, silently, as she finds her place again, somewhere past the middle of the book. "And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them--"

Claire sits back down on the bed, not remembering she stood. She watches her mother read, ignoring the words as best she can.

"--That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose." Her voice is clear and even. Claire looks down at her hands, rubs at a purple line of burn across the palm. Sometimes it itches. The Bible is opened past the middle. "And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years."

Claire lifts her head slowly.

"Mom?" Claire whispers. Amelia reads louder.

"--There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bear children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown."

"Mom," Claire says again. "The nephilim are in Genesis."

"--And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth--"

 

*

 

Claire wakes.

"No," she says, to the ceiling, to the watcher. The room is cold. It's not the rain, it's true, penetrating cold. "That's _bullshit_. That's not possible. No one has ever said anything about fucking angel blood."

She goes to the bathroom. The sight of her trash bin, filled with pink wrappers and _have a happy period!_ and, potentially, ichor, makes her laugh, helplessly, a noise more like being stabbed. An angel is a cataclysm, not a horny freshman. This is a lie. She's still on schedule to smash someone's face in. Claire washes her face. She goes back into her freezing room.

It's just the bible, opened to a page she doesn't look at, sitting on the night stand today. She reaches over it for the phone.

"It's Claire. Call me back," she tells Dean Winchester's voicemail. She settles back the reciever, and her eye catches, sticks on the open page. Most of the words have been blocked out in harsh black pen scribbles.

_For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell, and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; and if he rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard); then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment_

Claire sits down and pulls the book onto her lap. There are scribbles throughout, on every page. She finds, unblocked:

_What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction_

She finds:

_For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality_

She finds, in a sea of black ink, and this time the scribbling extends to the margins, has been so vicious there are tiny holes in the paper--Claire thought she had been flipping randomly, but now she is certain she had not been, the last thing she finds is:

_And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell._

Claire drops the bible. "Castiel," she says, and no one comes, no matter how many times she says it. The phone doesn't ring. She is alone.

 

*

 

Claire goes out that day, but only long enough to find a bottle. She takes it back to the motel room, scuffing carelessly through her salt line, to sit heavy on the bed, the still-made, pristine bed, where her mother never really slept.

"Let's talk," she says, and twists open the bottle. She lets the cap fall to the floor. "Let's party, whatever the fuck you are."

Claire takes the rum like medicine, impatient, barely tasting it. She doesn't get up to pee. She doesn't do anything but sit on top of the pristine bed and wait for the sick dizziness to hit her and watch the sunlight climb the walls.  

It doesn't take long, only a minor eternity. When the last gulp tries to come up again she lays down and closes her eyes. Without willing it, her legs pull up to her chest.

 

*

 

Claire opens her eyes.

The desk clerk is on Claire's unmade bed, sitting directly over the borders of the devil's trap. He's more beautiful than she remembered. Probably she should have noticed a teenage boy with no acne.

“I know the fairy tales all say to use three or seven, but I personally like four," the devil says. "Four seasons, four directions, four horsemen.”

"Four and twenty blackbirds, baked into a pie," Claire says, face still squashed against the pillow. "Why are you doing this?"

"Don't you like it?"

Claire struggles upright. Her head hurts, even in the dream, and her saliva feels like glue. "You want something, demons always do," she says. "But why--like this? Why the motel room? Why--" Her voice fails. Why is her mother's face still pinched when she dreams her, why does her stomach ache, why are her scars still there. "Are you not strong enough?"

"I am an _archangel_ ," he says. Claire has the fleeting terrified satisfaction of having annoyed the devil. "And I don't lie. The Claire who hasn't killed anyone will never come back. Your father won't come back. Your mother will not be the same."

"Spell it out," she says. "I'm just another dumb monkey, here. Use your words."

"You're special," he says. "You know what's inside you. You know what you can do."

 _Tie a knot in a cherry stem,_ she wants to say, and she thinks the devil hears, because the desk clerk's head rolls to the side, sudden, loose, and Claire sees his neck. Sees the skin suppurating and turning purple there, just for an instant, and then he's beautiful again, and looking at her.

"I need hands in this world," he says. "They need to be strong, and they need the right blood, and they need to be very, very motivated to open the gates of hell."

Claire looks down at her hands, at the crooked finger, at the fingertips dark with pen ink. The bible is on the floor between them. _Him who can destroy both soul and body in hell._

"She was good," Claire whispers. "She was always--always good."

The devil stretches in a way that says he hasn't worn a human body in a long time. It hurts to look at. He nudges the open bible with his toe.

"Find fairness," he invites.

"When I wake up--"

"When you wake up," the devil says. "You'll know where to start."


End file.
